Category: resources
AWDF 2021 Recognition Survey Report
AWDF 2021 Recognition Survey Report
As part of our monitoring, evaluation and learning process, AWDF conducts grantees’ Recognition surveys annually to identify achievements and recognition of grantees supported. The recognition survey report focuses on highlighting grantees achievements and acknowledging their impact and contribution to achieving women’s equal rights and gender justice.
Read the 2021 Recognition Survey here
Bread and Butter #5: Legal Literacy as Integral to Rural Women’s Land Rights
Bread and Butter #5: Legal Literacy as Integral to Rural Women’s Land Rights
The concept of land is one that has been described as the cornerstone of economic development. According to Odeny (2013), land is one asset that farmers, pastoralists and other communities base their livelihoods. Land is also a significant component of business assets, which play significant role in business investment strategies. Thus, securing land rights can have a profound impact on economic development of any group of people.
This study situates land located in rural areas as both a means of agricultural production, livestock rearing and a place for gathering natural products that play an important role in local economies such as woodcutting, wild harvesting, grazing, fishing and hunting inter alia. In most cases, particularly among indigenous people, land is a source of identity and cultural heritage.
Read the second article in the second series here:
Legal Literacy as Integral to Rural Women’s Land Rights
Vibrant Canvas: AWDF Annual Report 2019
Vibrant Canvas: AWDF Annual Report 2019
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Vibrant Canvas is the world told by African women, created and founded in their experiences.
In 2019, AWDF granted more money to women’s organisations than in any previous years, and we supported the largest number of grantees in our herstory, strengthening their organisations’ systems, skills and cultures. We convened, produced and shared knowledge, hosted artists and claimed power in a chorus of feminist voices. We stretched across Africa – North, South, East and West, and further into the Middle East. We grew, in scale and scope. We saw and created change in process and outcome.
For AWDF, 2019 meant expansion with connection, it meant a deepening of the work for equality and justice and an engagement in the interconnected realities of womanhood. AWDF and its partners gathered the pieces, collected colour, stretched the canvas and painted for the telling of a story. We revealed a world, and created new designs in glimpses into the world of the future.
Vibrant canvas is a look into the world made by African feminists over the course of 365 days in 2019.
Please click here to read the Summarised version of the Report
For the Full version of the Report, please click here
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La Toile Dynamique : Réalité des femmes africaines créée et fondée sur leurs expériences.
En 2019, l’AWDF a accordé plus de subventions aux organisations de femmes qu’au cours des années précédentes. Nous avons soutenu le plus grand nombre d’organisations bénéficiaires de subventions de notre histoire, et avons aussi renforcé leurs systèmes, leurs compétences et leurs cultures.
Nous avons organisé des rencontres, produit et partagé des connaissances. Nous avons accueilli des artistes et ensemble, (dans un seul accord tout en unissant nos voix en tant que féministes) avons réclamé le pouvoir. Nous sommes répandues partout en Afrique – Nord, Sud, Est, Ouest, et au Moyen-Orient. Nous avons grandi avec une ampleur considérable. Nous avons vu et créé des changements dans le processus d’obtention des résultats.
Pour l’AWDF, 2019 a signifié une croissance avec connexion, un approfondissement du travail pour l’égalité et la justice et un engagement dans les réalités interconnectées de la féminité. L’AWDF et ses partenaires ont rassemblé des informations, choisi la couleur, tendu la toile et l’ont peinte pour raconter une histoire. Nous avons révélé un monde, et créé de nouveaux dessins pour pouvoir découvrir le monde du futur.
La Toile dynamique, réalisée par les féministes africaines, est un regard sur le monde couvrant 365 jours en 2019.
Pour lire la version simplifiée du rapport annuel 2019, cliquez ici
Pour la version complète du rapport annuel 2019, cliquez ici
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2020 Grantee Recognition Survey
2020 Grantee Recognition Survey
As a feminist organisation, AWDF continuously strives to support the growth and long-term sustainability of women-led organisations. Since 2013, we have been conducting grantees Recognition surveys annually to identify achievements and recognition of grantees we have supported two years prior to the survey. This is part of our monitoring, evaluation and learning activities.
The 2020 grantee recognition survey covers grantees who received US$ 5000 and over in grants in 2018. Online survey questionnaires were sent via Google forms to 54 organisations in 18 countries in Africa and the Middle East (41 organisations in 11 Anglophone countries, 13 organisations in 6 Francophone Countries and 1 bilingual country).
Click here to read the RECOGNITION SURVEY REPORT
Return of our Knowledge Product: Bread and Butter Series
Return of our Knowledge Product: Bread and Butter Series
We look to continue envisioning a future Africa that ensures women’s and girls’ sustainable livelihoods, meaningful labour, and full socio-economic autonomy.
Launched by AWDF in October 2018, the Bread and Butter Series is a knowledge product that culminated from the African women’s economic futures convening held in Accra in the same year. Twenty-seven (27) activists, academics, development workers and knowledge producers extensively discussed and engaged in workshop and group activities to build sound advocacy strategies aimed at shaping sustainable economic futures for African women. The convening was informed by AWDF’s fourth strategic plan Shaping the Future, and its accompanying Futures Trends Analysis Report which highlight evidence-based socio-economic trend implications projected for women and girls on the continent.
Read the first article in the second series here:
African Feminist Futures – Macro-economic Pathways
The expression “bread and butter” refers both to the ways in which individuals come to sustain themselves usually through paid work and individuals’ practical, every day needs and concerns. The economic futures convening was a first step in a journey to better support future-oriented strategies that engender African women’s economic justice and security. Since then, we have continued to work with dynamic African feminist writers to conceptualise, research, document and publish critical and radical perspectives about theirs and the experiences, contributions, needs and opportunities of African women and girls at micro and macro-economic levels.
Covering a range of topics from macro-economic policy pathways to the actual implication of distribution of economic resources at household level, this knowledge series affirms that African women’s economic issues are both internalised and challenged in everyday acts of resistance and solution-building. Moreover, that like never before, it is critical to, among other things, demystify economics as a white, male and Western concept that is out of reach for African women.
The Bread and Butter knowledge series uphold that all African women understand the consequences and solutions for oppressive neoliberal capitalist economic models and seek to encourage their voices as economic actors, thinkers and shapeshifters.
We invite your readership and engagement with the real “bread and butter” issues that women and girls face in Africa through the opinion pieces, research essays and narratives compiled in this series. And as you do, we look to continue envisioning a future Africa that ensures women’s and girls’ sustainable livelihoods, meaningful labour, and full socio-economic autonomy.
We hope that this series will engender new conversations about how we support African women to pursue economic justice and security. We also hope to contribute to a larger conversation about how philanthropic institutions regionally and globally can better support African women’s economic interests, as described by African women, themselves.
Do you have feedback on any of the Bread and Butter articles? Please email our Knowledge Management Specialist, dinnah@awdf.org
Solidarity in Word and Deed: Translating the African Feminist Charter
Solidarity in Word and Deed: Translating the African Feminist Charter
Author: Jessica Horn, AWDF Director of Programmes
It may seem odd to be excited about a publication. However the story of the translation of the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists begs recounting as a tale of inspired collective action.
The Charter itself was developed by the African Feminist Forum Working Group in 2006 and adopted in by over 100 African feminists at the first African Feminist Forum (AFF) hosted by AWDF in Accra that year. The goal was political clarity. Every movement needs to articulate its visions of ethics and collective power-and its political bottom lines. The Charter provided this, and has been used since as a means of bringing feminist activists across generations together to build feminist consciousness, create new feminist spaces and even to help unite women mobilising against religious fundamentalism.
As beautiful as it is, the Charter was written in English- a language spoken by some but not all of Africa’s people. Translating the Charter was imperative. However as is typical in the world of women’s organising, the AFF faced the challenge of funding. What we had not anticipated was the spontaneous action and love that we would receive in the form of voluntary translation by African activists so moved by the Charter that they saw it necessary to make sure the people they organised alongside could read it too.
In its first incarnation, Beninoise feminist and AWDF staff member Rissi Asani-Alabi translated the Charter into French for use in the bilingual AFF regional forums and to aid the creation of national Feminist Forums in Francophone African countries. Using this, Senegalese feminists Fatim Faye and Kura Saar went on to translate the Charter into Wolof, a language spoken widely in Senegal and Gambia. In the revised version additional translation support was offered by Pathé Diagne, one of Africa’s leading linguists and political scientists (who has, notably, also translated the Quran into Wolof).
In Tanzania, staff of the country’s leading women’s rights organisation Tanzania Gender Networking Programme translated the Charter into Kiswahili, opening up readership in Central and East Africa and offering feminist discourse in Kiswahili including the term feminism itself and a translation of the concept of ‘patriarchy’ (mfumo dume).
And the feminist love has continued to flow.
On reading the Charter for the first time, Egyptian women’s human rights defender Yara Salaam offered, in typical generous style, to translate the text into Arabic. Her father, poet and translator Refaat Sallam provided proofreading support, making the Charter accessible now to Arabic-speaking feminists across north and northeast Africa and to African feminists in Arabic speaking diasporas.
After returning from the 4th African Feminist Forum in Zimbabwe in early 2016, Angolan feminists Sizaltina Cutaia and Âurea Mouzinho were inspired to revive feminist organising by creating the Ondjango Feminista in their home country. Their first step, working with Florita Telo, was to translate the Charter into Portuguese to allow women in Angola to read and rekindle feminist activism. Through this solidarity, Portuguese translations of the Charters are already in the hands of feminist activists in Angola, Mozambique and Brazil- including with two of Brazil’s ground-breaking women capoeira masters.
This year we have worked with East African feminist graphic designer Lulu Kitololo to create a stunning new redesign of the Charter, producing versions in all of the languages available thus far. For Latin script we used title fonts created by The League of Moveable Type, a self-named leader in the open source font revolution, offering highly designed free fonts. In Arabic, Yara Salaam suggested use of the Amiri font- an open source font project design to revive and digitise an older Arabic typeface.
We often think of solidarity as large public displays. However there is solidarity in these quieter acts of resourcing a movement through knowledge, skills and time. Feminism is not just in the saying, it is in the doing. The process of redesigning and translating the Charter of Feminist Principles has proved that.
Our heartfelt thank you goes to everyone who has participated in making the Charter relevant and accessible to the widest possible audience. We hope you find the new materials useful. And as always, do let us know how you are using them
Download the charter for free:
Evidence Based Prevention of Violence Against Women Convening Report: Building African Feminist Momentum
Evidence Based Prevention of Violence Against Women Convening Report: Building African Feminist Momentum
The rates of violence against women have reached pandemic levels across the world. It is estimated that 1 in 3 ever-partnered women above the age of 15 have, at some point in their lives, experienced some form of physical or sexual interpersonal violence. In some parts of Africa, the prevalence rate is almost double that of the global average at 65.6%¹. The far-reaching physical, emotional and economic impact of this violence on the lives of African women cannot be overstated. However now, more than ever before, bringing violence against women to an end is a tangible possibility.
At this critical moment, there has been a shift to focus on evidence-based prevention of this violence against
women with programmes producing quantifiable results that reflect the magnitude of their impact in this area.
African feminists – and the political lens with which they approach the issues – have been essential to prevention work, pioneering efforts to bring violence fuelled by gender inequality and patriarchal power to an end. With international interest in this field growing, AWDF saw the need to convene African practitioners and donors to look at ways of galvanising the efforts of African feminists operating at every level to advance the work and even more firmly establish African feminism as the centre.
To read the rest of the report click this link.
Grantee Profile: Gender Links – Don’t Get Angry, Get Smart
Grantee Profile: Gender Links – Don’t Get Angry, Get Smart
Gender Links – for equality and justice
From the outside, the unassuming red-brick house in Johannesburg’s southern suburbs does not look like much. From the street, it would be near impossible to guess that these are the offices of one of Southern Africa’s leading women’s rights organisations. Gender Links is a small organisation with a large footprint, with over 600 partners in ten countries, all working towards the promotion of women’s rights in the region. Gender Links CEO Colleen Lowe Morna is no stranger to advocacy work. She started her career as a journalist specialising in gender and development. After South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, she became an advisor on gender and institutional development. “We like to say we work from the grassroots all the way up to the elephant,” she laughs. This approach is necessary, says Morna. “The main challenge working in the gender space is the reality gap. There is a marked difference between constitutions, legislation, policy and the lived realities of women.”
Morna says it is widely accepted that it is difficult to see the results and impact of gender justice work on paper. Gender Links, however, might be an exception to this. From work with grassroot organisations to policy change at state level, the sheer scope and breadth that Gender Links operates on is hard to
comprehend.
“Gender Links acts as a big sister to smaller organisations, who are in turn empowered to mentor others,” she explains. “Our work is to build the capacity of our little sisters.” While the stories of individual stories of women who have benefitted through Gender Links programmes are significant, the organisation’s impact is also evident in its numbers. The Gender and Governance programme, spearheaded by Gender Links, has put gender on the local government agenda. There are now 432 councils in ten countries recognised as Centres of Excellence for Gender in Local Government. These local councils have committed to work towards 50/50 representation at local government level, while furthering gender responsive budgeting and service delivery. These councils cover a population of around 40 million people, approximately 34% of the population in the ten countries they are located in. “We can’t just start talking about representation of women in government at a national level in parliament,”
Morna explains. “But it’s also not enough to talk about representation among local government councillors. We need to look at women’s political participation as a whole. That includes the committees that deal with water and sanitation and housing and all other things.”
To read the rest of this incredible profile, please click here
AWDF Grantee Recognition Survey 2019
AWDF Grantee Recognition Survey 2019
African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) is a Pan-African grant making organisation that funds local, national and regional autonomous women’s rights organisations in Africa and the Middle East, that are working towards the promotion and realisation African Women’s Rights. Since the beginning of its operation in 2001, AWDF has awarded grants and provided technical support to over 1,340 women’s organisations in 43 out of the 54 countries in Africa and since 2017 in 2 countries in the Middle East. As part of the methods AWDF employs to assess the impact her grantees have made and are still making in the lives of women in their various project areas and on the continent at large, an annual Grantee Recognition Survey is conducted. This forms part of AWDF’s monitoring, evaluation and learning instruments. The survey seeks to identify achievements of past grantees, and highlight those whose partnership with AWDF contributed to said awards or recognitions. It also serves as a way of following up with grantees whose grants have ended.
The AWDF grantees are doing a tremendous job in line with AWDF’s vision of having “A world where all African women live in peace, with dignity and justice and where there is equality and respect for women’s rights”. This is through their tireless efforts of fighting for social justice in their communities,
contributing to the improved living conditions of beneficiaries and also increase recognition and inclusion of women’s rights issues in the development agenda at various levels.These genuine efforts have earned them recognition, awards and influence in their localities / communities, countries, the continent and beyond. The survey showcases the recognition / awards of AWDF’s grantees and also highlights the role AWDF played. These awards / recognitions come in different forms and AWDF seeks to systematically track and document such recognitions / awards annually. For the 2019 Grantee Recognition Survey, questionnaires were sent through Google forms to 61 organisations in 22 countries (48 organisations in 16 Anglophone countries and 13 organisations in 6 Francophone Countries) who were awarded with grants of US$5,000 and above in 2017. The sections below present the findings gathered from the responses received.
Read the full Recognition Survey Here
A Practical Handbook for Financial Management
A Practical Handbook for Financial Management
At AWDF we believe that in order to achieve impacts towards our collective mission of advancing our women’s rights we also need to dedicate resources to help build the capacity of changemaker organisations. As a donor, AWDF aims to support best practice financial management both internally and also amongst our grantees. We acknowledge that financial management is an area that many smaller and community based organisations needs support with, particularly when balancing smaller and project specific budgets, which make it difficult to cost professional support around finances. We encourage general finance management literacy among our grantees as well as providing specific training for finance staff to strengthen internal systems and sustain good financial management practice.This guide was originally developed by AWDF staff, then updated by AWDF’s Finance Manager Gertrude Bibi Annoh Quarshie based on the emerging needs of grantees. This third update includes further information and research on financial risk management and procurement.
We hope that this document will continue to be usefulfor women’s rights organisations. We welcome feedback on how you are using it!